I got up early again. Yikes. I always sleep soundly and get up early on vacations. Holidays are unnatural times. I took the tube to Euston Station and for a mere 41 pounds sterling bought a return ticket (round trip) to Manchester. This is the most expensive single-use purchase on the trip. The most expensive train trips in Europa are in the UK.
Manchester is one of those places no one seems to visit unless you know someone. In this case, I know A, of A and A. He is one of my penpals and I visited him in Bath last year. I stayed in their suburban home and took the train to Cardiff from Bristol the following day. A is the one who first told me about the Teletubbies, when all they were were annoying children's TV characters, and not a lavender menace to all good anglo-saxon children.
It was just three hours for Euston to Manchester (Mcr from now on). I was met by A and M at Piccadilly Station. M is my penpal from Yorkshire who drove over so we could meet. Ain't that nice? In Manhattan I have trouble getting people to visit me in my glamourous Upper East Side old-law walk-up tenement flat. Yet in Britain people are coming round for dinner with perfect strangers, and driving over the Pennines just to say hello. Perhaps I am living on the wrong side of the Atlantic.
We went to the Gay Village, a revitalised portion of industrialised Mcr that is actively marketed to queers. A muddy brown canal runs along Canal Street. We went to a large airy pub and met A and C. A is A's partner and he and C are going on a cruise to Scandinavia.
After about an hour A and C headed off to the coast to catch their ferry across the North Sea and M and A and I toured the centre of Mcr. It's full of wonderful Victorian architecture, and despite a devestating IRA bomb blast in 1996, Mcr is rebuilding quickly. Mcr will be the home of the world's largest Marks & Spenser's. It is already home to a gigantic white Debenham's that looks just like Mussolini's train station in Milan. The only thing missing was a she-wolf feeding swarthy twins over an SPQR insignia.
We walked through Affleck's Palace, an old department store that caters to youth and nostalgia that has nothing to do with hacktor Ben Affleck. Dayglo, beads, and clothes only the young would wear. I could feel every cell in my body aging as we walked around the place. But, skin problems, Fun Boy Three albums, and a voracious appetite for chocolate keep me young.
We had lunch in a cavernous chain restaurant that used to be a cinema. Wax figures of old women sat where the balcony might have been. Disconcerting only because they seemed to be staring at me and I wanted to tell them to stop. That would have been silly. Almost as silly as the time a kid in London's Mme. Toussaud's Wax Museum, in 1985, thought I was wax and screamed when I moved. He was probably scarred for life and probably voting Tory now.
M drove us back to A's semi-suburban home. We stopped for a scenic overlook of a reservoir. It's amazing how amazed I am by a simple thing like a valley. In New York the closest thing we have to this is Sixth Avenue in the 50s, where the cracker box skyscrapers make a glass canyon.
In A's town we took a nice walk around the brook and the canal. A Victorian-era railway bridge featuring stone arches still carries commuter trains. The town is small and compact and formerly a mill town. The mills are still there. A's house is an attached home built in the 1870s. After tea, and a long conversation about pets (which must've been driving M crazy), we went to dinner. A's dog was "poggy," whatever that means. Probably old and smelly. But I didn't notice. My olefactory senses are off, always are. I am practically anosmic. He's a sweet 13-year-old spaniel or sorts who just wants attention. He runs around with his squeaky toy and puts his head on your lap. That's just what I do when I need attention.
We walked about a mile to the pub. We all had "chicken supreme." That's chicken with some sort of creamy sauce. The waitress was quite friendly. A says that everyone is friendlier up north. A says that there is a local paper named NOW -- north of Watford. Many Londoners and others down south don't thin that there is anything worthwhile north of Watford.
A and A probably do not think they are activists, but they are. They are not hiding their relationship (except for A2's mother), and A says that it takes him two hours to shop on Saturday mornings because everyone is so chatty in the small shops -- the butcher, the produce, the news agent. A says that it's sort of like the British book Two Gentlemen Sharing, where two gay men move to a small English village, and how it eventually dawns on everyone that they are gay. A and A have even gone to a mostly straight line-dancing event and danced together as a couple. This was not an everyday event for the usual dancers.
In a world that is not granting us civil rights, marriage, or legal protection, doing things like this in small places is, in my head, a major political act. A is also the one who, encouraged by a superior at work who came out in front of an audience no less, also stood up and outed himself, and so did five other people. A would never bang his own drum, but in a world where speaking your mind is sometimes to dig your own grave, standing up, chatting in the store, line dancing with your lover, are activist moments. It's the odd perversity of our lives, that just being ourselves is an activist event.
The closet is something straight people find convenient, and something they have to walk by en route to larger rooms. Trying staying in a closet for a while. It's claustrophobic. Closets are not pleasant for gay people. So come out, encourage someone to come out, and support those who do. It's a continuous process and it can be exhausting, and even dangerous, but it has to be done.
As we walked back to A and A's house, it was quite chilly. The pavement was barely enough for the three of us to walk at the same time. The moon wasn't out but there were lots of stars. Orion was out hunting in the southeast sky. You just cannot see the wonders of nature clearly when you're in the closet. Being closeted is just unnatural. It's probably the only thing about homosexuality that is unnatural.
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